5 facts you didn’t know about Instagram
Before Instagram became the social media behemoth that we know today, it began as a fledgeling company that was the idea of two Stanford graduates. With more than two billion active users, the Meta-owned social media platform might already occupy a rent-free position in your head. But here are some things that you might not have known about Instagram.
Instagram was not even called that in the beginning
Kevin Systrom was a Stanford graduate that worked on building Gmail and corporate development for Google. According to Inc., Systrom spent his weekends building a location-based photo and note-sharing app called Burbn. That is where he met Mike Krieger, who was an enthusiastic early user of Burbn.
Systrom and Krieger worked together to pivot Burbn to a photo-sharing app and they renamed it Instagram, which is a portmanteau of “instant camera” and “telegram” According to The Atlantic, they did this because they felt Burbn was too similar to Foursquare. Also, the photo-sharing feature was quite popular among Burbn users.
The first Instagram post
On July 16, 2010, Systrom shared a picture of his dog and his girlfriend’s foot with the caption “test.” While this is often attributed as the first post on the platform, the actual first post on the platform was posted earlier on the same day Krieger, who posted a picture of the South Beach Harbour in San Francisco. According to ET, this picture was taken at Dogpatch labs incubator, a cheap, rented office space.
Instagram was for squares
The Instagram app was officially launched on Apple’s App Store on October 6, 2010. More than 12 years later, your Instagram feed is probably filled with vertical videos and occasionally, landscape content as well. But that was not always the case. In the beginning, all Instagram posts were restricted to square 1:1 aspect ratio images.
But this was a bit counter-intuitive for a photo-sharing app. If you wanted to upload a picture of yourself at the Eiffel tower, you would have to choose between including the tower or yourself. Your other option would be to add movie-style letterboxes, but on the sides of the image. Instagram finally changed this rule in August 2015, when it began allowing users to upload images in landscape and portrait orientations.
Facebook’s lottery ticket
As you may already know, Facebook acquired Instagram in a cash and stock deal on April 9, 2012. But what you may not know is how well that paid off for Facebook, which now goes the name of Meta. Right now, Instagram is valued at over $100 billion and according to Business Today, just Instagram Reels is poised to earn over $3 billion for the company this year.
pic.twitter.com/aZ2JzDf5ai
— Chadwick Boseman (@chadwickboseman) August 29, 2020
Most liked picture on Instagram
Currently, the most-liked tweet on Twitter is one from actor Chadwick Boseman’s account, announcing his death. The tweet has over 7.1 million likes and has been retweeted or quote tweeted close to 3 million times. On Instagram, the most like photo is slightly less meaningful than that.
Until 2019, the most-liked picture on Instagram was one of Kylie Jenner’s daughter posted the celebrity’s account. In January of that year, British advertising executives Chris Godfrey and Alissa Khan-Whelan created the account “@world_record_egg” and posted an image of an egg against a white background. In less than ten days, this picture became the most-liked post on Instagram, surpassing Jenner’s picture. As of October 2022, the picture is still the most-liked Instagram post of all time with more than 55 million likes.
